Challenges growing as citrus industry searches for answers

FORECAST 2008: AGRICULTURE

Farmers continue to fight for survival in Central Florida -- and 2008 will be a critical year.

With citrus greening disease spreading through citrus groves, along with canker and winged pests, that key part of agriculture in Central Florida struggles to stay focused and afloat.

From the high, sandy citrus groves of Orange, Lake and Osceola counties to the low, Indian River region of Brevard and Volusia on the coast, growers strain to see a future.

"We have a lot of challenges," said Mike Sparks, chief executive of Florida Citrus Mutual, a trade association with 9,000 grower members throughout Central and South Florida.

But the industry has faced freezes and calamities in the past and found ways to survive and prosper, Sparks said. The industry has a mix of "good news and bad news," he said, and in that respect commercial fruit production is no different today than it was in decades past. Right now, crop prices are high -- a big plus -- but costs, such as fuel and energy, are rising, too, along with the threats.

Growers are pressing for more research into greening, the tree-killer disease now found in every major citrus county. But individual growers are also taking matters into their own hands wherever possible. West Orange County grower Maury Boyd, for example, has been exploring the field of tree nutrition to see whether growers can tap natural plant resistance to ward off diseases such as greening.

"Plants have a very complex immune system, but most science has been about killing the predator or pathogen, not enhancing the immune system," Boyd told fellow growers and scientists earlier this year.

Some of Boyd's South Florida citrus trees are doing far better than expected in fighting off greening, for which he credits his experimentation with chemicals and "nutritionals" applied in certain ways. He said his "positive results, versus cutting down and burning trees," suggests "there may be an answer" to the greening disease.

If no breakthroughs are achieved, though, Florida's total orange production is likely to slip another 11 percent to 149 million boxes during the next seven years, according to new projections by Mark Brown, chief economist for the Florida Department of Citrus. The official forecast for the current harvest is 168 million boxes, well below the 225 million or so boxes harvested in the late 1990s.

The projection for grapefruit is grimmer still: The annual harvest is expected to plunge another 50 percent during the next decade, from 25 million boxes this season. This year's expected harvest is already down by nearly half from the volumes recorded before the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons damaged the trees and spread citrus canker more widely.